Is Your Marketing Tech Stack Built to Play Nice?

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Calvin is Vice President, Marketing at Lingotek, a cloud-based SaaS and services company that is changing the future of translation. He is a high-tech global marketing executive with over 18 years of experience working with a wide range of companies from Global 1000 and Fortune 500 companies to small start-ups.

To enable continuous delivery of dynamic global content, your digital marketing strategy not only requires powerful data analytics and agile technologies that can perform at scale, but also widespread connectivity to the various repositories in which your content resides. That’s why it is so critical to ensure seamless integration between your marketing technology (martech) solutions.

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A recent article shared a cautionary tale of a new CMO who replaced the company’s existing CRM with his preferred platform, only to find out that it didn’t have the ability to integrate with its existing infrastructure. It ended up costing the company over $50,000 and three months in dev time to create the custom code needed to integrate the new CRM.

No matter how many applications you have, to ensure dynamic, continuous delivery of personalized content, your global marketing tech stack needs to know how to play nice.

If you want to ensure dynamic, continuous delivery of personalized content, your global marketing tech stack needs to know how to play nice

Marketing tech stacks are growing

To get an idea of the sheer number of tools in a typical marketing stack, take a look at the 2017 Stackie Awards Winners. The prize-winning illustrations demonstrate both the ubiquity and complexity that modern marketers are dealing with. In 2011, there were only 150 companies offering marketing technology solutions. Today, there are almost 5,000.

Each tool that global marketers use--customer relationship management (CRM), content management systems (CMS), eCommerce, knowledge bases, etc.-- leads to an exponential amount of content that must be continuously created, updated, and translated for end users around the world. The organization and management of these systems is becoming more complex, leading marketers to adopt a strategic vision for the interoperability of these platforms.

The challenges of maintaining multiple martech tools

The downside to maintaining several martech applications is the tendency to operate them in silos with little integration between them. This requires more staff, more time, and more resources to manage. Add on the demands of a 24/7 content delivery cycle, and it makes managing consistency, quality, and updates even more difficult.

While there are several marketing cloud platforms available today--Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce, etc.--there is no single suite of tools that provides fully-interoperable applications to address all of your digital marketing needs. Best-in-breed solutions still require you to pick and choose the right tool for the right job. Sometimes those tools will already coexist within the same marketing cloud, but often, they won't. For example, you may have the Adobe Marketing Cloud, but you may prefer Marketo, Pardot, or Eloqua for managing your email campaigns. It’s not at all uncommon to find multiple marketing clouds or platforms being used within the same company; or even the same department! Some day there may be one marketing cloud to rule them all, but we're far from that now.

As the organization and management of a martech stack becomes more complex, marketers need to adopt a strategic vision for the interoperability of their applications

Consumers today expect engagement to be personalized and relevant. A recent Fast Company article, “3 Ways to Make Your Company Relevant,” explained that your brand and message has to appeal to the personal values and community of the end user. Personalization is how companies create relevance and you can’t be relevant or personal if you are not providing content in their native language. To personalize engagement, content must be continuously translated, which can be costly if each department is using a different language services provider. The end result is that companies are paying to translate the same content over and over again.

Working in silos also creates problems for consistent messaging and branding. It is important that your global consumers have the same user experience, no matter where they are or what language they speak. To maintain corporate governance and control, marketers need to look for more integrated solutions.

Centralize for better CX, agility & scalability

In Marketo’s 2018 Predictions, Senior Director of Marketing, Chris Connell, recommends that companies centralize for two reasons: scalability and customer experience. “It will be imperative to centralize support where possible in order for marketers to scale up to meet a multitude of demands. It’s about a unified engagement experience across the organization that puts everyone on the same page to meet customer expectations.” To unify customer engagement, brands must maintain consistency in their messaging across different languages and locales.

Tools to ensure your stack “plays nice”

To justify budgets and spend, CMOs must add better tools and technology. As the martech stack grows, so does the expectation to achieve data-driven, measurable results. Lara Shackleford, Global Head of Partner Marketing at Marketo believes that growth requires “an open ecosystem and the ability to connect data from all applications to have a clear view of business impact.”

A recent McKinsey & Company article, CEO guide for avoiding the ten traps that derail digital transformations, stressed the importance of integration when building digital ecosystems. “Investing in a strategy around application interfaces (APIs) (the links that allow disparate systems to “talk” to each other) is crucial so that businesses develop the means to integrate with many different partners, vendors, and platforms.” An integrated stack lets you streamline delivery and improve efficiency, and that will save both time and money for your organization.

“The goal is to create a martech stack with open architecture that supports dynamic message delivery and allows you to plug in new components.”

In its article, 5 Things to Consider Before Investing in Content Technology, the CMI Institute identified the end goal: automation. Your organization “needs a highly intelligent, near-total automation of the content supply chain. The goal is to create an open architecture that supports dynamic message delivery, and allows you to plug in new components that support new content types, social channels, or consolidated profiling.”

If you approach your tech stack keeping in mind that additional tools and applications may be added down the road, you’ll establish a solid foundation for seamlessly integrating future systems. There are several important strategies to be aware of to ensure that the solutions in your tech stack play nice with each other.

Cloud-Based Software as a Service (SaaS)

For large, global enterprises, the only way to handle the volume, continuity, and synchronization between several different departments and locations is by managing content in the cloud. Unlike offline, premise-based tools that are unable to talk to one another, cloud-based technology makes integration much easier. Real-time, 24/7 access and the centralized management that cloud offers improve collaboration, is more efficient and makes it easier to manage dynamic global content.

Most cloud platforms are offered on a Software as a Service (SaaS) basis. SaaS has become an attractive distribution model because there are no upfront costs and you only need to pay for it as long as you need it. Another benefit of SaaS is, that as new APIs and/or integration capabilities are released by the software provider, a SaaS license means you get that benefit of an upgrade without paying new licensing fees. Upgrading also become seamless, which means you're always able to take advantage of the latest and greatest advancements from the software tools in your martech stack. In addition, there are no obligations; you can end your subscription at any time. Because SaaS offerings are usually cloud-based, seamless integration with other applications is easier, making your suite of tools more agile and scalable.

Application Programming Interfaces (API)

When it comes to customizing your martech stack–adding apps, integrations, and connectors-look for APIs that can integrate nicely with your existing systems. Ideally, you want tools that offer an open/public API that is free to use and built using RESTful technology, which is the industry standard. These APIs are easier and less expensive to integrate with. Proprietary APIs and/or closed software ecosystems are typically more costly to integrate with (if you can integrate with them at all). Furthermore, there’s no guarantee that your integration will work properly with future upgrades to the software. In a 2017 CMSWire article, API-led Commerce Drives Next-Gen Digital Experiences, warned against older technology that isn’t easily integrated:

“Software vendors will refactor their ancient architectures or be left behind. The old world of closed, proprietary stacks is dead software walking....The best-of-breed approach is, by design, way more flexible and makes full use of the benefits of an API approach. In such a solution, the goal is to combine (many) different solutions into one giant environment that completely covers the needs of the organization.”

Every silo you integrate is going to result in ROI, increase digital performance, and throughput.

The importance of API for translating content

For global enterprises, a multilingual API is an easy way to integrate enterprise applications with a translation management system (TMS). With a multilingual API, you can easily upload source content for translation, have the content automatically translated, and download the translated content back into the original application. Enterprises that operate in silos are creating translation bottlenecks.

The solution is to enable continuous localization throughout the enterprise. Every silo you integrate is going to result in ROI, increase digital performance, and throughput. By integrating continuous localization into the martech stack, you can reduce translation spend across the board.

Connectors and App Marketplaces

Even better than a software tool with an API, is a software tool that already has an out-of-the-box integration or “connector” with one or more of the other tools in your martech stack. Selecting martech tools and platforms that have a robust marketplace of plugin applications can be a positive sign that connectors already exist for many of the integrations your martech stack will require. Or that if they don't, some aspiring integrator will soon build and release to the app marketplace one that you can use. The same principle applies when selecting your translation technology. A TMS with a suite of connectors to the most popular martech tools will help to ensure continuous localization of your content regardless of where it lives in your technology stack. The most powerful connectors provide deep integrations between tools, allowing you to work directly in your native environments and translate content without leaving your site--no working in silos and no need to switch between applications. Users can translate, update, and publish global content in a single, uninterrupted workflow.

Create an ecosystem built for success

Global customers are looking for personalized engagement and an agile, integrated martech stack is the perfect ecosystem for delivering relevant, consistent CX. Integrating your global martech stack will optimize efficiency and increase the speed of delivery. When multiple tools and platforms can work together more effectively, your global business goals become more manageable, and more importantly, attainable.